Free Republic

Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters remain in limbo today as crews scramble to complete an emergency repair to the workhorse Bay Bridge. The 73-year-old bridge, crossed by more than 260,000 cars and trucks a day, was shut down for a larger, unrelated seismic upgrade project. Now, crews are working to fix a cracked steel link, called an eyebar, that helps hold up the east span. Inspectors discovered the problem Saturday afternoon, setting in motion a dash to fix a problem that - by itself - would have forced officials to shut down the bridge. "There's a lot of...

America’s tradition of bold national projects has dwindled. With the country’s infrastructure crumbling, it is time to revive it ___ THE Mississippi River pushed relentlessly past dozens of levees this month. Towns were submerged, their buildings tiny islands in murky water. Ducks paddled on ponds that had once been farmland. Some flooding was inevitable, given the force of the swollen Mississippi. But a poorly managed flood-defence system did not help. For the past few years it has been hard to ignore America’s crumbling infrastructure, from the devastating breach of New Orleans’s levees after Hurricane Katrina to the collapse of a...

Taxation: Always ready to use a tragedy to raise taxes, the Democrats want to hike the gas tax in the aftermath of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. The country should be pleased that President Bush rejects the idea. Democrat Rep. Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has proposed a 5-cent increase on the 18.3 cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax. The Minnesota congressman says that over three years the extra nickel would raise $25 billion that would be placed in a new trust fund from which money would be drawn to repair or replace structurally deficient highway bridges. We're not saying...